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9 Responses to “It’s a long way down to the bottom of the LINK LOVE”

re: guns on campus, every time someone talks about arming teachers, I jump into that fray. Would carrying a gun make a student less likely to confront me? Misbehave? And when does the gun come out?

I always maintain that a gun would simply escalate the situation. I’ve had enough mad students, even in my young teaching career, to know that I don’t want those situations to get any worse. I am genuinely convinced that a gun would do nothing to help.

I’m sure you agree with me, hence the linking. That’s a pretty brilliant article, by the way. Thanks for sharing.

PS If you want to shake your head, I’m in Florida right now, and they’re considering a bill that will let teachers concealed carry if given permission by the principal and superintendent. I’d like to know which school liability insurance will cover that.

Would I have to know a student’s name in order to shoot him/her? Because some semesters, that might be a problem, especially with students who attend sporadically (who also, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, seem most likely to fall into the disgruntled/possibly violent category; apparently one doesn’t have to actually attend my class much to develop considerable animosity toward me/it).

[joking; very much joking. I don’t want to be armed; I don’t want my students to be armed; I definitely don’t want some of our “junior police officers,” or whatever they call the student interns in our campus police force, armed. They already use the other lethal, if inadvertent, weapon some of them are issued — a vehicle — dangerously enough. I’m willing to concede that the actual police officers probably need to have weapons available, but I very much hope that they will consider using them a last resort, and, so far, the gun-death rate on my campus — also, to my best knowledge, zero — suggests that that is the case.]

I’m pretty sure that, if I were forced to carry, the gun would ultimately end up being used against me. My students this year (high school, half AP classes) are pretty awesome all around. But I’ve had some disgruntled kids before, and I wouldn’t have put pulling a gun on me past some of them.

When I taught college, yes, I think the ones who attended least were usually the most prone to violence. I did have one time where I student sent me a violent email about my grading. I forwarded to a supervisor (I was a TA), asked him to deal with it, and said “remember this name if I end up dead in a ditch somewhere.”

I’m not excited about the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. It reminds me too much of that kind with chocolate, strawberry and vanilla (cosmopolitan?) where most people would go for the chocolate first, then the vanilla, and the strawberry might just crystallize away. I prefer everything (good) to be mixed in more evenly.

The piece about “effectuation” is very interesting. I have definitely operated that way since college, both professionally and in the substantive trajectory of my scientific research program. It’s really not too different from being opportunistic based on a clear read of conditions as they exist *right now*, and a discounting of the value of prior plans as conditions change.